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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Creating Digital Content at Demo

A lot of this afternoon's sessions focused on consumers creating content online. Many of these companies want to be the next YouTube, and while they won't all be successful, there are a number of interesting new choices.

Cornerworld created a platform for artists to upload videos and similar things, and then to promote and distribute it to other sites. What makes this special is a business management tool, so professionals can get paid for their work. It has email newsletters, geographic targeting, live streaming video, etc. It looks good, and the idea of getting paid for your work is great, but it's a very crowded market.

Scenecaster is designed to create 3D scenes running in a standard web browser. They can take 3D content from Google's 3D Warehouse and include it into their own scenes. You can also link to products in your scene, and buy them. The goal is to bring the 3D web to a mass market, and a free trial is available now. As with most 3D creation tools, it looks cool, but seems aimed at a very narrow market.

PeopleJam is a site designed to inspire people to do the things they want to do: lose weight, manage their finances, eat right, etc. It has videos and dialogs, all tied around "life topics" such as diet, health and nutrition, so that people can give advice to one another. They have life coaches, personal trainers, etc. all designed to make people happier; along with several celebrities giving their life stories. It looks fine, but I'm not sure that it really stands out among the many health and social sites.

LiveMocha is a really good looking site for language learning, by adding a social networking twist to self-learning tools. This web site offers a community based learning approach, including iin-depth instructions, exercises that are really interactive conversations with other users, and a motivational system based on a point system that rewards you for working on a new language. In other words, an English speaker might do an exercise in Spanish, and a native Spanish speaker who wants to learn English might suggest corrections. Then you can set up conversations with each other, allowing for more interactive conversations. It looks like a great way to learn.

Graspr offers a how-to video site, designed to make it easier to find and share instructional videos, with most of the earlier videos on things like home repair, crafts, etc.
You can find videos through a search engine, then make comments and notes and see the comments other users have made. It also has a community message board, active chats, etc. What makes it more special is that the videos are well organized Even more impressively, they are working on tools to let you upload your own videos, and add titles, transitions, etc. It's hard to stand out among all the web sites with video on it, but this did look very good

Two other demos rounded up the afternoon. Earthmine plans to create 3D maps of the city. They showed very nice 3D images with photographs showing a street view in San Francisco that looks just like looking around in a location. You can search for addresses, for tags, etc. It all uses geo-coding to navigate within a city; and lets you link to other systems. The goal here is to create lots of new geographic reference data. It's pretty, but it's a daunting challenge, since lots of people are working on 3D maps, and mapping is a very competitive market.

Mobilized by Myxer makes it easy to create mobile content from an existing web site. You can take video and audio and just drag into into a tool, and it will automatically convert it into a mobile storefront, with you setting prices for each item, from video to ringtones. It seems a great way of converting content to mobile formats.

Overall, this afternoon's demos showed some very nice web sites, with my two standouts being LiveMocha and Graspr.

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